I was ten years post-op in 1982, the year the film “Blade Runner” came out.

I found myself identifying with Pris, the replicant played by Daryl Hannah. I found a perfect metaphor to describe how transsexuals were treated not only by the doctors but by a lot of society as well.

We looked human and acted like humans.  Some of us even tried to create fictional pasts and happy normal childhoods for ourselves.

Others spoke of the doctors who did their surgery in term that sounded almost like those the replicants used for their creators.

We didn’t need the doctors to tell us that passing improved the way we were treated and up graded our status from replicant to human.

In the film there was one Replicant, Rachael, who was one of the most perfect replicants ever.  they had a version of one of those multi-phasic personality tests that the Normies used to root out Replicants.

It usually took 20-30 questions to unmask a replicant. It took 120 questions to unmask Rachael.

I’ve known sisters like Rachael, so perfect in every way with a loving supportive family.

I’m far too defiantly punk to be bothered with trying to be so deep stealth, too sure of my own validity, too willing to say I am not a replicant even though I had sex reassignment surgery.

In 1982 Dr. Laub gave me the ten year follow up questionnaire. I found some of the questions dehumanizing and told Judy Van Maasdam what I thought of those questions. I said I know you really consider us replicants and not really human.

Judy was shocked  that I thought they treated us like replicants, experiments and not like ordinary humans.

She chastised me for calling myself a replicant. I said, “Replicant is the polite term, the cruel term is “skin job.”

I was pretty battered by 1982.

That year I had marched in the Pride Day with what was the only lesbian contingent that welcomed post-transsexual women, the S/M contingents, Samois and the Outlaws.

I wore leather and marched topless. I had a bad attitude and was filled with contempt for the radfems and the book banning, anti-sex followers of Dworkin and MacKennon.

My leathers were more punk than S/M but my attitude towards the the radfem/anti-sex transphobic bigots was real.

I didn’t tell Judy half of the shit post-transsexual women were being put through, because between the reactionary right wing crap the psych establishment was pushing in order to pathologize us and the hateful bigotry of the radfems it was hard to remain functional and not become so depressed suicide or substance abuse seemed like the only alternatives.

How could one explain to a Normie what it felt like to have your legitimacy as a human being treated as something open to debate.

How feminist groups had so many categories that we treated as meriting special consideration and how words like disabled were being banished from the language, even when used as an unthinking adjective. Except being or having been transsexual meant that you were fair game for the vilest sort of verbal and emotional abuse.

I opted for isolation, withdrawing into myself.

I also got the hell out of the snake pit of the San Francisco “Lesbian Community.”

Hey I’m bisexual.  I don’t need this shit.

I’d rather hang out with people who make music, paint, do photography.

I’d rather go to concerts with gay male friends.

Anything to avoid the bigotry of the radfem shits.

I moved back to LA  where the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center was nothing like what had been going on in SF.

But I had learned my lesson.

It took me a long time to own my body. To feel good about my cunt and not give a shit about lesbian scum who would reject me because my cunt has surgical scars.

Over the years I stopped going to lesbian bars.  Usually the ambiance sucks and the attitudes toward Ts/TG women suck even worse.

Yeah you have a right to not sleep with us. Just like you have a right to sleep only with white, blonde, northern European women who are Catholic.

But the fucking cotton ceiling isn’t about that.  No one gives a shit about what your personal sexual preferences are.

Don’t insult us by pretending your hatred of TS/TG people isn’t bigotry.

It is and transphobia is a real word.

Radfems need to buy a fucking clue.  Their screaming about the terror and harm being inflicted upon them by transsexual and transgender women is both bigotry and has all the appearances of a pathology.

One tenth to one quarter of one percent of people who are among the most despised and deprived, powerless people on earth aren’t much of a threat to anyone.  Particularly when so many of them are caught up in inner struggles trying to make sense of why they are TS or TG.

Particularly when that tiny percentage of people is generally speaking at or close to the bottom of the socioeconomic and political power ladder.

Most TS/TG people aren’t all that economically advantaged.

Unlike tenured radfem academics and lawyers whose firm represents Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.

The cotton ceiling isn’t about your personal preferences in sexual partners.

It is about creating a climate of hate that pathologizes, delegitmatizes and demonizes our genitalia and our entire beings.

We do not go into the Pleasure Chest and buy our vaginas from the shelf like they are the dildos so many lesbians seem to be into.

Our bodies, ourselves…

Despite the blood libel of the radfems I colonized no one’s body.  I took control of my own.

My taking female hormones altered the chemistry of my own body and the shape of my body became that which it is with an estrogen based body chemistry.

As for the “powerful drugs” I take, they aren’t all that different from the early birth control pills.  Indeed one of the early medications I took was a birth control pill.

As for my surgeries and scars…

You have no idea the level of contempt I hold you in when you abuse your Normie privilege by treating my body as something to sneer at and abuse.

I just bet you are a bundle of laughs when it comes to other differently abled people.

Oh I forgot.

They are sacred.

Do you ridicule women who have had hysterectomies or mastectomies?

When you argue chromosomal level essentialism, have you had your own chromosomes examined to make certain they are perfect?

Besides which, doesn’t that chromosomal level essentialism reify patriarchal ideas regarding the essential differences between men and women, a proposition that is a slippery slope to male supremacy and female inferiority.

Or is it just our cunts that offend you?

Is it the scars?

It must be nice to be a Normie supremacist and be able to look down on skin jobs like me.

It must be nice to be a Normie and sneer at and ridicule the bodies and lives of TS/TG replicants.

Do you have any idea the level of privilege you expect when you demand the “right” to discriminate and legally deny us our equality and our human rights?

Some TS/TG people have spoken as to how they hate you for your sense of superiority.

You expect us to have the same hatred for ourselves, that you hold for us and are surprised when we don’t.

It must really blow your minds that we are no longer good little replicants cowering in hurt from your abuse.

It must fuck with your cosmology for us to organize and stand up for our rights, even if our existence offends you.

You want to be separate, be separate.  You do not speak for most women.  Or, considering how much progress TS/TG sisters have made within the lesbian feminist communities, even for most lesbians.

And if we treat you like Aryan Nation or the KKK it is because you are like Aryan Nation and the KKK, bigots with nothing to offer but hate.

JOS over at Feministing posted a must read piece…

From Feministing:  http://feministing.com/2012/06/28/enough-with-i-date-women-and-trans-men/

By Jos
Published: June 28, 2012

I’m traveling on the east coast right now, which has thrown me back into the kind of queer, mostly female assigned community that exists in the “I date women and trans men” frame (I’m not saying this doesn’t happen on the west coast – but I’ve found alternatives way more easily). This is a big part of what my Girl Talk piece was about, but I want to address this particular issue really directly.

“I date women and trans men” is the definition of cissexism. It’s basing your frame for sexuality on the gender coercively assigned to a person by their doctor at birth, not on that person’s actual identity. In this case, we’re talking about folks who were assigned female. Of course, “women” means cis women – trans women totally drop off the map.

My critique of this frame isn’t about everyone on the trans masculine spectrum, where there’s a ton of complex gender and sexuality diversity (though there is an important conversation to have about the privileging of masculinity here as well). I’m talking about how this approach to sexuality addresses people who were assigned female at birth but are men.

Continue reading at:  http://feministing.com/2012/06/28/enough-with-i-date-women-and-trans-men/

From WCSH Portland, Maine:  http://www.wcsh6.com/news/article/205436/2/Singer-songwriter-Cidny-Bullens-comes-out-as-transgender

Cindy Williams
June 28, 2012

PORTLAND, Maine

After Cindy Bullens married, moved to Maine and lost one of her 2 daughters to cancer, that she did her most important and gut wrenching work as a singer songwriter: the album “Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth.”

Now, for the first time, Bullens is going public about something those closest to her have always known. She now goes by the name Cidny instead of Cindy — after the realization she has lived her entire life “Somewhere Between” male and female.

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-lyon/the-cult-of-gay-masculinity_b_1631713.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

Richard Lyon
06/28/2012

The threat that gay men have long posed to the cultural dominance of straight males has always had a close connection to gender and gender-related behavior. Across most human societies there has historically been social tension arising from the struggle to maintain male dominance. In Western societies, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K., male homosexuality has been seen as a threat to that dominance. It is a failure to conform to expected notions of masculinity. Highly repressive laws and customs forced homosexual men to relate to each other in very secret and clandestine networks. As a result, the general society had very little opportunity to experience the personal diversity of this group of people. The ones who were visible were those who displayed gender-variant behavior, such as cross-dressing. Out of this set of circumstances, there emerged a broadly held stereotype that all homosexual men were effeminate in their taste and behavior.

Around the middle of the 20th century, a gay subculture began to emerge and become increasingly visible to the general public. One of the tasks for the developing gay movement, as for other oppressed minorities, was to combat stereotypes that presented a distorted picture of reality. The issue of gay masculinity has always been central to this debate. By now most members of the general public are aware that gay men are not uniformly effeminate. It’s been pretty well established that we come in different shapes and sizes and behave in diverse ways.

Of course, the emerging gay subculture and movement was a sideshow to the massive upheavals in gender roles and behavior that were going on in mainstream culture. Feminism was posing a challenge to traditional male domination, and with it came an extensive debate about what it means to be male or female and to what extent people should be expected to conform to strict roles assigned to their gender. Historically, we have had binary notions of gender, with the belief that there should be a clear-cut distinction between males and females. Things have now changed to the point that even staunch conservatives would not really expect people to adhere to the gender roles that were prevalent in the 1950s.

It seems to me that there is now something of a countervailing trend afoot among many politically self-conscious gay men. From an effort to counter the notion that all gay men are effeminate, they have moved toward the position that all gay men should present an image of red-blooded American masculinity. The drive toward becoming respectable leaves no room for the presence of gay men who are less than fully and thoroughly butch. I just watched a documentary called The Butch Factor. It unrolls a long series of interviews with gay men pushing and shoving each other on the athletic field or subduing wild animals. In the interest of balance, they manage to squeeze in a couple of unfortunate men who are unable to measure up.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-lyon/the-cult-of-gay-masculinity_b_1631713.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

Especially when they are saying the exact same words.  Christo-Fascist or Radfem Borg Cult, what difference does it make if Liberty Counsel wrote the script for both.

From Right Wing Watch:  http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/steve-crampton-enda-insanity

Steve Crampton: ENDA is Insanity

On today’s episode of Liberty Counsel’s “Faith and Freedom” radio program, hosts Steve Crampton and Harry Mihet were discussing the Pentagon’s decision to no longer allow Bibles to be published bearing the official emblems of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps; a move which has, predictably, outraged the Religious Right.

Somehow Crampton and Mihet managed to tie this issue to a recent Senate hearing on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA,) prompting Crampton to marvel that a transgender person was actually allowed to testify on behalf of the legislation and complain that ENDA is not about “equal rights” but rather “special rights” for gays and cross-dressers.  

Crampton stated that if ENDA passed, he could come into work – “God forbid,” he said – wearing a dress and would be allowed to use the women’s restroom.  “In years past,” Crampton said, “we had another word for this: it’s called insanity”:

See also:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/30/steve-crampton-liberty-counsel-radio-host-gay-rights_n_1639705.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/30/penn-state-president-sandusky-abuse

Graham Spanier allegedly failed to report abuse claims despite knowing that inaction could leave Penn State ‘vulnerable’

Matt Williamsin New York
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 30 June 2012

A former president of Penn State University failed to report allegations of child sex abuse against Jerry Sandusky despite knowing inaction could leave the college “vulnerable”, according to emails seen by several news organisations.

Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, is currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of 45 counts of sexually assaulting underage boys over a 15-year period.

But with Sandusky now behind bars – potentially for the rest of his life – attention is turning to whether there was a cover-up at the university, one that may have allowed Sandusky to carry on with his abuse for many years. Two of Sandusky’s former colleagues, athletic director Tim Curley and finance official Gary Schultz, have already been charged with perjury and failing to alert authorities to one act of sexual abuse.

And in a potentially damaging development, former university president Graham Spanier has been cited as another member of staff who knew about allegations of abuse but did nothing to alert authorities.

CNN said on Saturday that it had seen emails in which Spanier discusses with Curley and Schultz a 2001 incident in which Sandusky was allegedly caught abusing a boy in a shower.

The messages reportedly show that Spanier was supportive of the decision not to hand Sandusky over to the authorities, but fretted that the decision could cause Penn State problems further down the line.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/30/penn-state-president-sandusky-abuse

From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/25-0

by Brian Moench
Published on Monday, June 25, 2012 by Common Dreams

This maybe one of the most important stories ever ignored by the “lame stream, liberal” media. It’s unlikely you’re losing sleep over US trade negotiations, but the unfolding business agreement between the US and eight Pacific nations –the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — should cause every US citizen, from the Sierra Club to the Tea Party to get their pitch forks and torches out of the closet and prepare to “storm the Bastille.”

The TPP negotiations have been going on for two years under extreme secrecy, no information has been made available to either the press or Congress about the US position.  But on June 12th a document was leaked to the watchdog group, Public Citizen, revealing the current US position and the reason for the secrecy.  The contents are surreal and shocking, and prima facia evidence for how corporations have become the master puppeteers of our government.

The leaked document reveals that the trade agreement would give unprecedented political authority and legal protection to foreign corporations.  Specifically, TPP would (1) severely limit regulation of foreign corporations operating within U.S. boundaries, giving them greater rights than domestic firms, (2) extend incentives for U.S. firms to move  investments and jobs to lower-wage countries, (3) establish an alternative legal system that gives foreign corporations and investors new rights to circumvent U.S. courts and laws, allowing them to sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for lost revenue due to US laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges or their investment “expectations.”

Despite NAFTA’s failures, corporations are arm-twisting the federal government to pursue trade agreements as inevitable and necessary for economic progress.  But 26 of the 28 chapters of this agreement have nothing to do with trade.  TPP was drafted with the oversight of 600 representatives of multi-national corporations, who essentially gave themselves whatever they wanted; the environment, public health, worker safety, further domestic job losses be damned.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/25-0

From The Center For Media and Democracy:  http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/06/11625/wto-not-so-cool-rules-against-popular-us-meat-labeling-law

by Rebekah Wilce
June 29, 2012

The World Trade Organization (WTO) issued a final ruling today against the U.S. country-of-origin labeling (COOL) law. This popular pro-consumer policy, which informs shoppers where meat and other foods were raised or grown, enjoys the support of 93% of Americans, according to a 2010 Consumers Union poll. Now Congress must gut or change the law to avoid the application of punitive trade sanctions.

WTO vs. Consumers

The original meat labeling law passed as part of the 2002 farm bill and was expanded in the 2008 farm bill to apply to other foods like fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Canada, Mexico, and several other countries filed a complaint regarding the policy with the WTO in December 2008 calling the popular consumer measure a “disguised” barrier to trade. The organization initially ruled in their favor in November 2011, but the U.S. filed an appeal in March 2012. Today, a WTO  tribunal made up of three trade officials ruled that the U.S. law is a violation of the WTO’s legally binding “Technical Barrier to Trade” agreement. The ruling is final. If the United States does not gut or change the law, the WTO can apply punitive sanctions, usually in the form of tariffs on U.S. exports. The ruling also casts into doubt the WT0-legality of other popular labeling laws.

Last week, the Obama administration invited Canada and Mexico to join the latest trade pact under negotiation, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), without an agreement to drop their attack on the popular U.S. consumer labeling. Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch at the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, commented: “The American public is desperately waiting for President Barack Obama to show some negotiating savvy, and to start fulfilling his campaign pledges and reconsider the so-called ‘trade’ model that his administration is pushing with the TPP.”

The ruling is the WTO’s third this year against U.S. consumer protection laws. In May, it ruled against U.S. dolphin-safe tuna labels, again, in a case that has been dragging on for over a decade. In April, it ruled against a U.S. ban on clove, candy, and cola-flavored cigarettes. “These three rulings — with the WTO slapping down safe hamburgers, Flipper and children’s smoking prevention policy — make it increasingly clear to the public that the WTO is leading a race to the bottom in consumer protection,” said Todd Tucker, research director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

Continue reading at:   http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/06/11625/wto-not-so-cool-rules-against-popular-us-meat-labeling-law

From Alternet:   http://www.alternet.org/story/156042/corporate_profits_at_all-time_high%3B_wages_at_all-time_low%3A_can_we_call_it_class_war_yet/

The middle class is being hollowed out; increasingly, there are the super-super-rich, and there are the rest of us.

By Sarah Jaffe
June 29, 2012

This week, David Segal at the New York Times broke the news to America that not only was Apple — the computer and gadget manufacturer formerly seen as a symbol of good old American ingenuity — making its profits on the backs of abused factory workers in China, but also on poorly paid store employees here in the US.

Apple store workers, he wrote, make up a large majority of Apple’s US workforce—30,000 out of 43,000 employees in this country—and they make about $25,000 a year, or about $12 an hour.

Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute notes that that’s just a dollar above the federal poverty level. This for a company that paid nine of its top executives a total of $441 million in 2011.

“The discrepancy between Apple’s profits/executive pay and its compensation to its workers is a particularly glaring example of what is occurring in the wider economy,” Mishel writes.

And he’s right. Also this week, Henry Blodget at Business Insider posted three charts that show just how out of whack our economic system really is. Corporate profits are now at an all-time high, while wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low, and fewer Americans are employed than at any time in the previous three decades.

Companies like Apple are squeezing their workers, leaving them to live on less, while lavishing pay and benefits on their executives. The death of lionized Apple chief Steve Jobs seems to have opened a floodgate of reporting and criticism of the company’s labor practices, but all this really proves is that Jobs and his empire are no better than, and no different from the rest of the US business elite. Just like everyone else, they’re taking their profits directly out of workers’ pockets.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/story/156042/corporate_profits_at_all-time_high%3B_wages_at_all-time_low%3A_can_we_call_it_class_war_yet/

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/29/while-colorado-burns-washington-fiddles

Drought, wildfires, storms, floods – climate change is happening, but the real disaster is our Big Energy-owned politicians’ inaction

Bill McKibben
guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 June 2012

In the political world, this was the week of the healthcare ruling: reporters hovered around the supreme court, pundits pundited, politicians “braced” for the ruling, “reeled” in its aftermath. It provoked a “firestorm” of interest, according to one magazine; it was, said another, a “category 10 hurricane”.

But in the world world, there was news at least as big, but without the cliched metaphors. News that can be boiled down to a sentence or two:

You ever wonder what global warming is going to look like? In its early stages, exactly like this.

Global warming is underway. Are we waiting for someone to hold up a sign that says “Here’s climate change“? Because, this week, we got everything but that:

• In the Gulf, tropical storm Debby dropped what one meteorologist described as “unthinkable amounts” of rain on Florida. Debby marked the first time in history that we’d reached the fourth-named storm of the year in June; normally it takes till August to reach that mark.

• In the west, of course, firestorms raged: the biggest fire in New Mexico history, and the most destructive in Colorado’s annals. (That would be the Colorado Springs blaze: the old record had been set the week before, in Fort Collins.) One resident described escaping across suburban soccer fields in his car, with “hell in the rearview mirror”.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/29/while-colorado-burns-washington-fiddles